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Dr. Craig Sailor
Assistant Professor, C.L.C.S.

Publications and Further Research Outputs

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Tag questions in, editor(s)Regine Eckardt, George Walkden, and Nicole Dehé , The Oxford Handbook of Non-Canonical Questions, Oxford University Press, 2025, [Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2025

Craig Sailor, Syntactic Dialectology and Linguistic Theory, Annual Review of Linguistics, 12, 2025 Journal Article, 2025

Minimalism and the syntax-phonology interface in, editor(s)Evelina Leivada and Kleanthes Grohmann , The Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism and its Applications, Cambridge University Press, 2024, [Heather Newell, Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2024

Byron Ahn and Sunwoo Jeong and Craig Sailor, Systematic 'stray' focus stress in English? ApparentLY!, Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 39), April 2021, edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz Sanchez, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Walter Smith, and Heidi Harley , 1, Cascadilla, 2024, pp21 - 31 Conference Paper, 2024

Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms, From restructuring verbs to exhortative particles: A Scots case study, 32nd Colloquium on Generative Grammar (CGG 32), University of the Basque Country, April, 2023 Conference Paper, 2023

Silvio Cruschina and Craig Sailor, What is "residual verb second"? And what does Romance have to do with it?, Isogloss, 8, (3), 2022, p1 - 28 Journal Article, 2022 DOI

Craig Sailor, Ellipsis in a modular perspective, The 45th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW 45) general colloquium, Queen Mary University of London, April, 2022 Conference Paper, 2022

The morphophonology of ellipsis: Evidence for Segregated Transfer in, editor(s)Anikó Lipták and Güliz Günes , The Derivational Timing of Ellipsis, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp225 - 252, [Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2022 DOI

Heather Newell, Craig Sailor, Inclusiveness in the phonology and the source of the Prosodic Hierarchy, Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics 14 (BGCL 14), KU Leuven, December, 2021 Conference Paper, 2021

Craig Sailor, Partial V2: Residue or innovation?, Residual Verb Second in Romance (ReVerSe 1) workshop, University of Helsinki, June, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Craig Sailor, Ellipsis and the phonological prespecification of roots, Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics 14 (BGCL 14), KU Leuven, December, 2021 Conference Paper, 2021

Craig Sailor and Valentina Colasanti, Co-speech gestures under ellipsis: a first look, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New Orleans, 2-5 January, 2020, pp1 - 11 Conference Paper, 2020 URL

Craig Sailor, Segregated Transfer of ellipsis sites: Evidence from Taiwanese, Linearizing Constituents Across Domains, Bled, Slovenia, October, 2020 Conference Paper, 2020

Rethinking 'Residual' Verb Second in, editor(s)Rebecca Woods and Sam Wolfe , Rethinking Verb Second, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp126 - 149, [Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2020 DOI

Craig Sailor, James Griffiths, Pseudopassives and PPs with gaps in, Guest lecture in the Comparative Syntax of Germanic graduate seminar, NYU Department of Linguistics, April, 2019, Richard Kayne and Gary Thoms Invited Talk, 2019

Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms, Exhortative clauses in Scots, European Dialect Syntax (EdiSyn) Workshop IX, University of Glasgow, March, 2019 Conference Paper, 2019

Byron Ahn and Craig Sailor, The landscape of semantics-prosody mismatches, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New York, New York, January, 2019 Conference Paper, 2019

Craig Sailor, Gary Thoms, Exhortative clauses in Scots, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New York, January, 2019 Conference Paper, 2019

Craig Sailor, Situating ellipsis within the derivational timeline, The Sluicing and Ellipsis at 50 workshop (Sluicing@50), University of Chicago, April, 2019 Conference Paper, 2019

Craig Sailor and Peter Svenonius, Thirty Million Theories of Features workshop, May, 2019, Tromsø, Norway Meetings /Conferences Organised, 2019 URL

Byron Ahn, Craig Sailor, Principled mismatches in the mapping from semantics to prosody, Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Sheffield, September, 2018 Conference Paper, 2018

Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms, Exhortative and jussive particles in Scots, Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Sheffield, September, 2018 Conference Paper, 2018

Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms, Exhortative and jussive particles in Scots, 12th Triennial Conference of the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster (FRLSU), University of Glasgow, August, 2018 Conference Paper, 2018

Craig Sailor, Apparent rule orderings involving ellipsis, The Timing of Ellipsis workshop, 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea (SLE 51), University of Tallinn, August, 2018 Invited Talk, 2018

Craig Sailor, The typology of head movement and ellipsis, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 36, (3), 2018, p851 - 875 Journal Article, 2018 DOI

When silence gets in the way: Extraction from 'do'-ellipsis in British dialects in, editor(s)Sherry Hucklebridge and Max Nelson , NELS 48: Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, GSLA, University of Massachusetts, 2018, pp145 - 154, [Gary Thoms and Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2018

Gary Thoms and Craig Sailor, When silence gets in the way: Extraction from do-ellipsis in British dialects, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Austin, Texas, January, 2017 Conference Paper, 2017

Gary Thoms and Craig Sailor, When silence gets in the way: Extraction from do-ellipsis in British dialects, North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 48, University of Iceland, October, 2017 Conference Paper, 2017

James Griffiths, Craig Sailor, Probing the PP domain: Complex possessive PPs in British English, Morphosyntactic Variation in Apositions workshop, University of Cambridge, May, 2017 Conference Paper, 2017

Gary Thoms and Craig Sailor, When silence gets in the way: Extraction from do-ellipsis in British dialects, Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Kent, September, 2017 Conference Paper, 2017

Craig Sailor and James Griffiths, PPs with gaps in, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Austin, Texas, January, 2017 Conference Paper, 2017

Craig Sailor, Rethinking 'residual' verb second, Rethinking Verb Second workshop, University of Cambridge, 2016 Conference Paper, 2016

Craig Sailor, Inversion for fuck's sake: left-edge polarity operators and their effects, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Washington, DC, January, 2016 Conference Paper, 2016

Craig Sailor and James Griffiths, PPs with gaps in, Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University College London, September, 2015 Conference Paper, 2015

Craig Sailor, On the derivational nature of ellipsis and the syntactic status of head movement, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Portland, Oregon, January, 2015 Conference Paper, 2015

James Griffiths and Craig Sailor, Prepositional object gaps in British English, Linguistics in the Netherlands Day (TIN-dag), Utrecht University, February, 2015 Conference Paper, 2015

James Griffiths and Craig Sailor, Prepositional Object Gaps in British English, Linguistics in the Netherlands, 2015, 2015, p63 - 74 Journal Article, 2015 DOI

The Emerging Middle Class in, editor(s)Rebekah Baglini, Timothy Grinsell, Jon Keane, Adam Roth Singerman, and Julia Thomas , Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, 2014, pp357 - 371, [Byron Ahn and Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2014

On the Non-Existence of Non-Constituent Coordination and Non-Constituent Ellipsis in, editor(s)Robert E. Santana-LaBarge , Proceedings of the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 2014, pp361 - 370, [Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms] Book Chapter, 2014

VP Ellipsis in Tag Questions: A Typological Approach in, editor(s)Rebekah Baglini, Timothy Grinsell, Jon Keane, Adam Roth Singerman, and Julia Thomas , Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, 2014, pp372 - 386, [Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2014

Craig Sailor and Carson T. Schütze, Is there repair by ellipsis?, Faculty of Language, December, 2014 Report, 2014 URL

Craig Sailor, The Variables of VP Ellipsis, UCLA, 2014 Thesis, 2014

Craig Sailor, Fuck-inversion in British English, Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), Oxford University, September, 2014 Conference Paper, 2014

Byron Ahn and Craig Sailor, Obligatory object gaps in infinitival clauses, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Minneapolis, Minnesota, January, 2014 Conference Paper, 2014

Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms, On the Non-Existence of Non-Constituent Coordination and Non-Constituent Ellipsis, The 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), Arizona State University, February, 2013 Conference Paper, 2013

Toward a Derivational Typology in, editor(s)Stefan Keine and Shayne Slogget , NELS 42: Proceedings of the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, GSLA, University of Massachusetts, 2013, pp121 - 134, [Craig Sailor and Anoop Mahajan] Book Chapter, 2013

Craig Sailor, Questionable negation, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston, Massachusetts, January, 2013 Conference Paper, 2013

Craig Sailor, Inflection at the Interface, UCLA, December, 2012, p1 - 37 Report, 2012

Craig Sailor, Remarks on Replies: On Emphatic Polarity in English, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), Portland, Oregon, January, 2012 Conference Paper, 2012

Anders Holmberg and Craig Sailor, 'Property definitions for polar questions and answers', Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages (SSWL), TerraLing, 2012, - Digital research resource production, 2012 URL

Craig Sailor, You can't 'regret so' (even if you 'think so'), Illinois Language and Linguistics Society 4, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April, 2012 Conference Paper, 2012

Craig Sailor, On Embedded Polar Replies, The Syntax of Answers to Polar Questions workshop, Newcastle University, June, 2012 Conference Paper, 2012

Craig Sailor, Tag Questions and the Typology of VP Ellipsis, UCLA, October, 2012, p1 - 40 Report, 2012

Anders Holmberg and Craig Sailor, 'Syntactic properties of English', Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages (SSWL),, TerraLing, 2012, - Digital research resource production, 2012 URL

Craig Sailor, Remarks on Retorts, 42nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 42), University of Toronto, November, 2011 Conference Paper, 2011

Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, Craig Sailor, Modeling Taiwanese speakers' knowledge of tone sandhi in reduplication, Lingua, 2011, p181 - 206 Journal Article, 2011 DOI

Craig Sailor, Anoop Mahajan, Toward a Derivational Typology, 42nd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 42), University of Toronto, November, 2011 Conference Paper, 2011

Craig Sailor, VP ellipsis in tag questions: A typological approach, 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 46), University of Chicago, April, 2010 Conference Paper, 2010

Craig Sailor, Grace Kuo, Taiwanese VP Ellipsis and the Progressive Prohibition, Joint meeting of The International Association of Chinese Linguistics 18 (IACL-18) and the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics 22 (NACCL-22), Harvard University, May, 2010 Conference Paper, 2010

Byron Ahn and Craig Sailor, The emerging middle class, 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 46), University of Chicago, April, 2010 Conference Paper, 2010

Craig Sailor, Byron Ahn, The Voices in our Heads: The VoiceP in English, Morphological Voice and its Grammatical Interfaces: Theoretic Modeling and Psycholinguistic Validation, University of Vienna, June, 2010 Conference Paper, 2010

Opacity, phonetics, and frequency in Taiwanese tone sandhi in, editor(s)Manghyu Pak , Current issues in unity and diversity of languages: Collection of papers selected from the 18th International Congress of Linguists (ICL 18), Linguistic Society of Korea, 2009, pp3019 - 3038, [Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2009

Effects of phonetics and frequency on the productivity of Taiwanese tone sandhi in, editor(s)Malcolm Elliott, James Kirby, Osamu Sawada, Eleni Staraki, and Suwon Yoon , Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 43), University of Chicago, 2009, pp273 - 286, [Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Sailor] Book Chapter, 2009

Craig Sailor, Tagged for Deletion: A Typological Approach to VP Ellipsis in Tag Questions, UCLA, 2009 Thesis, 2009

Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Sailor, Opacity, phonetics, and frequency in Taiwanese tone sandhi, nterfaces in Phonology workshop, held in conjunction with the 18th International Congress of Linguists (ICL 18), Seoul, Korea, July, 2008 Conference Paper, 2008

Craig Turnbull-Sailor, Syntactic patterns of embedded wh-clauses, University of Kansas, 2007 Thesis, 2007

Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Sailor, Effects of phonetics and frequency on the productivity of Taiwanese tone sandhi, 43rd annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 43), University of Chicago, May, 2007 Conference Paper, 2007

Wug-testing the 'tone circle' in Taiwanese in, editor(s)Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon , Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 25), Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 2006, pp453 - 461, [Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Turnbull-Sailor] Book Chapter, 2006

Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Sailor, Revisiting the psychological reality of Taiwanese tone sandhi, Joint meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics 14 (IACL-14) and the 10th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL-10), Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, May, 2006 Conference Paper, 2006

Jie Zhang, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Turnbull-Sailor, Wug-testing the 'tone circle' in Taiwanese, 25th annual meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 25), University of Washington, April, 2006 Conference Paper, 2006

Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

Craig Sailor, A modular theory of elliptical silence, Linguistics talks series, Université du Québec à Montréal, January, 2024 Invited Talk, 2024

Craig Sailor, A conceptual argument for ellipsis as null exponence, Linguistics talks series, Princeton University, March, 2023 Invited Talk, 2023

Craig Sailor, Ellipsis as evidence for the Phase Impenetrability Condition, Word Structure Research Group, Montreal, February, 2023 Invited Talk, 2023

Heather Newell, Craig Sailor, Inclusiveness, the interface, and the Prosodic Hierarchy, Penn State Morphology & Syntax Syndicate, Penn State University, December, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Craig Sailor, Ellipsis isn't deletion at PF, You're on mute: NYU Seminar on Ellipsis, NYU, October, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Craig Sailor, When silence takes scope: A vulgar argument for null operators in English innovative V2, AcqVA colloquium series, NTNU, April, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Byron Ahn, Sunwoo Jeong, and Craig Sailor, Emphatic weak certainty in English: Focus at the syntax-semantics/-phonology interfaces, Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST) 3, Princeton University, March, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

James Griffiths and Craig Sailor, Probing the structure of complex possessive PPs in British English: Some experimental results, Departmental Colloquium in Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, November, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Craig Sailor, Ellipsis in a modular perspective, SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge, March, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Craig Sailor and Gary Thoms, Exhortative clauses in Scots, Eh-Lab: Syntax of Speech Acts research group, University of British Columbia, May, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Byron Ahn and Craig Sailor, The role of syntax in semantics-prosody misalignments, Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST) 2, Princeton University, April, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Craig Sailor, Segregated Transfer of ellipsis sites: Evidence from Taiwanese, A symposium by Team Stowell: in honor of Tim Stowell, University of Greenwich, October, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Craig Sailor, Negative inversion without negation, Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 10, 2017, p88 - 110 Journal Article, 2017

Craig Sailor, How English rediscovered verb-second, Centre for Language and Linguistics talks series, University of Kent, March, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Craig Sailor, Head movement is syntactic, and ellipsis is too: evidence from Mainland Scandinavian, Linguistics Research Seminar series, University of Ulster, February, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Craig Sailor, Narrow-syntactic interactions of head movement and ellipsis, Linguistics colloquium, University of Konstanz, July, 2016 Invited Talk, 2016

Craig Sailor, Polarity-driven inversion in British English and beyond, Linguistic colloquium, University College London, February, 2015 Invited Talk, 2015

Craig Sailor, The size of silence: diagnosing the fine structure of VP ellipsis, Talks in linguistics series, University of Illinois at Chicago, November, 2012 Invited Talk, 2012

Toward a derivational typology in, editor(s)Thomas Graf, Denis Paperno, Anna Szabolcsi, and Jos Tellings , Theories of everything: In honor of Ed Keenan, UCLA, 2012, pp367 - 381, [Craig Sailor and Anoop Mahajan] Book Chapter, 2012 URL

Research Expertise

Keywords

LINGUISTICS

Recognition

Representations

Journal reviewer for Linguistic Inquiry

Journal reviewer for Natural Language & Linguistic Theory

Journal reviewer for Linguistic Variation

Journal reviewer for Glossa

Postgraduate admissions assessor (MPhil in Linguistics), Trinity College Dublin 2022

Journal reviewer for Syntax

Journal reviewer for Journal of Linguistics

Journal reviewer for Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics

Journal reviewer for Canadian Journal of Linguistics

Journal reviewer for Linguistics in the Netherlands

Journal reviewer for Snippets

Edited volume reviewer for the Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism [CUP]

Edited volume reviewer for Syntactic Architecture and its Consequences [Language Sciences Press]

Edited volume reviewer for the Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis [OUP]

Edited volume reviewer for Rethinking Verb Second [OUP]

Edited volume reviewer for the Derivational Timing of Ellipsis [OUP]

Conference/workshop reviewer for the North East Linguistic Society (NELS)

Conference/workshop reviewer for the Linguistics Society of Great Britain (LAGB)

Conference/workshop reviewer for Cambridge Comparative Syntax (CamCos)

Conference/workshop reviewer for Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE)

Conference/workshop reviewer for European Dialect Syntax (EDiSyn)

Conference/workshop reviewer for the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL)

Departmental Colloquium series organizer, University of Tromsø 2018-2020

Postgraduate admissions assessor (MPhil in Linguistics), University of Cambridge 2017

President, Linguistics Graduate Student Association, University of Kansas 2005-2007

President, Graduate Linguistics Circle, UCLA 2009-2010

Personal Tutor to ca. 35 undergraduates, University of Edinburgh 2020-2022